One Surreal Christmas Day: When Bing Crosby Met David Bowie

How an unlikely cultural mash-up produced a holiday classic (and provided an iconic crooner his swan song)

Every Christmas season, Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” makes its reappearance, reminding the world yet again of a bizarre, but ultimately magical encounter that took place in 1977. Nothing about what happened during the recording of the “BING CROSBY’S MERRIE OLDE CHRISTMAS” TV special makes sense even today…but, God, am I glad I have it in my life.

Here’s how Scott D. Elinburg described the improbable team-up in 2015, writing for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. He-Man. My Little Pony vs. Strawberry Shortcake. Barbie vs. Justice League. A tea party with Abraham Lincoln and Cinderella.

These are a few of my favorite things.

These “what if?” scenarios are culled from the imagination of children. Because children have no precautions about creating impossible scenarios, they combine disparate objects and people to actualize their visions. Adults are typically terrible at this. But sometimes, just sometimes, they turn the impossible into reality.

In 1977, at the request of absolutely no one, an impossible dream came true.

An impossible dream indeed, at least for me, given the fact that Crosby and Bowie are two of my favorite musical performers of the past century. I own a frightening number of albums from both of them, and Bowie, Bob Dylan, and my creative relationship to their art and lives inspired a significant character in my debut novel PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD. Toss in the fact that I’m a Christmas fanatic, and it’s fair to say I sit at the center of a very unique Venn diagram of Crosby, Bowie, and Christmas.

As the story of the song’s inception goes, Crosby didn’t even know who Bowie was. I’m unconvinced of this, as Crosby had always had a voracious appetite for what was hip. Once upon a time, when he was the biggest movie star in the world (1944 to 1948), you even saw this show up onscreen in his musical numbers. If there was a new trend in music, he found a way to integrate it. Yes, maybe this appetite had waned by his seventies…but, as I said, I’m unconvinced he didn’t have at least a passing knowledge of who Ziggy Stardust, glam rock icon, was.

Likewise, Bowie said afterward he was barely aware of Crosby’s work, suggesting he couldn’t identify more than a song or two from Crosby. Again, I’m unconvinced of this. Bowie spent the seventies lying to the press to downplay the influence of others on his work, even contradicting himself with impunity because it wouldn’t be until decades later and the advent of the internet that most of us would discover just how well he had manipulated his image in the media.

Now, consider that the duet — this intergenerational cultural mash-up — was never supposed to be a medley of two different songs. But Bowie walked into the taping, and, not a fan of “The Little Drummer Boy” he was meant to perform with Crosby, insisted he sing something else.

“We didn’t know quite what to do,” Ian Fraser, who co-wrote the “Peace on Earth” half of the song, said in 2006. Instead of panicking, he and the special’s scriptwriter Buz Kohan and his co-musical supervisor Larry Grossman spent seventy-five minutes feverishly working up the song to satisfy Bowie’s demand. Crosby and Bowie perfected the new song in less than an hour, Crosby singing “The Little Drummer Boy” and Bowie providing a counterpoint tune with “Peace on Earth”.

The result of this most unlikely of pairings, a white-bread crooner and a taboo-shattering rock star, produced a duet for the ages — an eventual Christmas classic after it was finally released as a single in 1982 — that would become Crosby’s unexpected swan song.

As Scott D. Elinburg wrote, “Just like ‘A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS’, this scene, this song, is [now] a cultural staple of Christmas, a building block for our collective Christmas memories; one more of those shared nostalgic experiences. But the subsequent death of Bing” — who died of a heart attack a month after recording the duet — “imbues this scene with a stark significance. His death marked a soft end to Baby Boomer Christmas nostalgia. As the calendar flipped from the 70s to the 80s, no living artist held up the foundation vacated by Bing. No one picked up where his legacy of Christmas left off. And I doubt anyone ever can.”

While Mariah Carey might argue with Elinburg, it’s been eight years since he wrote those words and, since then, Bowie has followed Crosby in death. The world feels lesser to me without them in it, but I’m grateful we have “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” to remember them and one surreal Christmas day in 1977 every year.

---

If this article added anything to your life but you’re not up for a paid subscription, please consider buying me a “coffee” so I can keep as much of this newsletter free as possible for the dreamers who couldn’t afford it otherwise.

---

My debut novel PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD is out now from Headline Books, Hachette Australia, and more. You can order it here wherever you are in the world: